While mostof the letters are the same or very close to the
English usage, there are some importantdifferences.

Pronunciation
Basics

Mandarin Chinese may sound strange, but is actually relatively easy
for English-speakersto pick up—much
easier than it is for Mandarin-speakers to learn English. A large part ofthe reason is that Chinese has a very limited
syllabary, meaning there are not manysounds in the language, and hardly any new ones if you already know English.

On theother hand, that means Chinese-speakers trying
to grasp English must learn to createdozens of entirely new sounds—remember that as you proceed through these first
lessonson
pronunciation!

One very different aspect of Chinese is its use oftones. Because of its limited
syllabary,

pitches of voice are used to help differentiate words. While some
dialects of Chinese

have up to nine tones, Mandarin is comparatively easy with only four.
It's often difficult

for beginners to distinguish the tone of a word, especially when not
sure of the context.

Even if you have perfect pitch, it may be hard to follow or reproduce
what can seem like

a rollercoaster ride of tonal transitions. Don't worry though, as
you'll improve with

practice. These lessons will describe how to understand and reproduce
all the syllables

and tones of Chinese.

A note about
IPA

TheIPA, or
International Phonetic Alphabet, is a standard set of symbols that can be used

to writeany sound fromany human language. If you know the IPA, it will be
used here to

give you a grounding inpinyin—the most common Romanization system for Chinese,

which will be used for the rest of the text.

The Mandarin
syllable

There are three parts to all syllables in Mandarin; theinitial, thefinal, and thetone.
In

pinyin, the tone, initial, and final are represented as
follows:

Tone

Thetone is represented by a tone mark placed on top of
the syllable. There are exactly

four tone marks:￣,ˊ, ˇ, andˋ. The two dots on ü (like a German umlaut) do not
have to

do with the tone, so if you see
, , , or , the symbolabove the dots represents the tone.